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Toronto’s Don River: from trash to natural treasure

The Rivers of Toronto: In this four-part series, the Toronto Star takes a look at the rivers of the GTA, their history, their guardians and their future.

The city of Toronto was built on the backs of its rivers. Nine rivers and creeks flow through its rich valleys and pour into Lake Ontario, making rivers as essential a part of Toronto’s landscape as the CN Tower or Queen’s Park.

The Don River Valley has gone through several transformations, from natural habitat to dumping ground for waste and pollution. Conservationists have worked to restore its beauty. (ROBIN LEVINSON / TORONTO STAR)

John Routh, former member of the Bring Back the Don task force, still volunteers to help preserve the Don River's natural beauty. (ROBIN LEVINSON / TORONTO STAR)

The Don River Valley as seen from Toronto's Prince Edward Viaduct through the so-called luminous veil. (TARA WALTON / TORONTO STAR)

“The ravines are to Toronto what canals are to Venice and hills are to San Francisco,” said Robert Fulford in his book Accidental City.

If rivers are symbols of Toronto, then the Don River, which runs 38 km from the Oak Ridges Moraine to Lake Ontario, is the city’s aquatic mascot.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, the river was the home of mills, breweries and brickworks, while the 20th century saw the once-fertile valley become a dumping ground for refuse and waste.

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By 1969, the river had basically turned into the city’s sewer. So on Nov. 16 of that year, 200 mourners gathered at Convocation Hall, at the University of Toronto, and paraded down to the Don in a spectacular mock funeral complete with a hearse.

“Lamentation and eulogies will begin on the banks of the deceased,” a poster read, advertising the funereal procession.

But 25 years later, the tides began to turn when a group of volunteer tree-huggers decided to bring back the Don.

“Everybody always says ‘Oh the Don, it’s such a dirty river,” said Peter Heinz, chair of the Don Watershed Regeneration Council. “But if only they could see it!”

Having spent his whole life within a 20-minute walk of Lawrence and Yonge, Heinz is a Toronto boy through and through. He used to camp alongside the Don near what is now Glendon College, back when the area was virtually undeveloped.

“It was much wilder,” he said.

An avid hiker and outdoorsman, Heinz remembers hearing people brag about the trails of Gatineau Park.

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“Hey, we got all that in Toronto!” he would attest. That’s why, in 2000, he joined the Don council, which is run through the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority.

“Because I enjoy them (nature trails), I want to protect them,” he said.

Like Heinz, John Routh felt an attachment to the Don since his early childhood. As a kid in Leaside, he remembers long days spent playing in the ravines.

“I’ve always had a connection to the Don,” he said.

He first got involved with Don conservation in 1997, when amalgamation connected his hometown to the rest of the city.

From 2005 until 2010, Routh was a member of the task force to bring back the Don, a group of citizens who advised city council on how to restore the Don River. On his blog, “The Don Watcher,” Routh wrote about everything from the threat of infrastructure to the Don’s connection to Toronto history.

When Rob Ford took office in 2010, the mayor disbanded a number of community task forces, including the Don task force. Routh said he misses the credibility the task force had with city council.

“I have less respect as an individual citizen,” he said. Routh has since joined the Don council with Heinz, as well as other river conservation groups.

Standing over six-feet tall with a hiker’s build, Routh looks every bit the naturalist in cargo shorts and a backpack when he hikes through Crothers Woods on a recent blistering July day.

If it weren’t for the steady hum of traffic on the Don Valley Parkway, the woods could easily be mistaken for a forgotten path on some country trail.

Instead, it is part of a string of conservation projects in the Don Valley that connect some of the city’s most urban neighbourhoods to lush ravines and wetlands.

Crothers Woods is a relic of the Don’s natural history, with some of the last remnants of real forest on the lower Don River Valley, which for the good part of the past century was more industrial wasteland than natural habitat.

When Sun Valley Brickworks closed in the 1930s, the city decided to turn the ghost mill into a trash heap. Mountains of refuse used to bake in the sun. In the 1960s, environmental practices around landfills changed, and the garbage was buried deep within the ground.

In 2004, Routh and others turned the trash cemetery into a young forest to extend Crothers Woods. And at the Evergreen Brickworks, the conservation authority fought to turn an old industrial quarry into a lush wetland.

What was once a “big gaping pit” is now the home of cranes, turtles and fish. Heinz said there are more beavers in the Don now than during the region’s fur-trading times.

Although most of the industry has moved away and environmental practices have improved, past mistakes still threaten the Don.

Prior to the 1950s, combined sewer overflow pipes were the norm. These pipes collected sewage and storm water, dumping overflow directly into the lake and rivers during times of heavy rain.

So when Toronto was hit by flash floods this July, the older sewers overflowed, dumping both polluted storm water and sewage into the Don. In some spots, this putrid stew bubbled onto city streets.

Toronto, with its many rivers, has always been prone to floods during storms. Trees, plants and little streams help collect heavy rain and keep it from flooding. But urban expansion in the past 20 years, especially in neighbourhoods such as North York and Scarborough, has stripped the land of trees and paved over streams.

Over the next 25 years, the city is spending close to $2 billion to update our infrastructure to better manage this storm water. Routh said this infrastructure is vital to keep the Don — and the city — healthy.

In the meantime, natural habitats like the Brickworks and Crothers Woods are necessary stopgaps to keep the floods at bay. The more the city grows, the more it needs lands like Crothers Woods to provide refuges from the urban, and shelters from the storm.

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